


Begin Again

by Electra_XT



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, Pining, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-07-31 21:29:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20121961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electra_XT/pseuds/Electra_XT
Summary: “It’s been a while,” Luther said, standing in the doorway.Allison swallowed.





	Begin Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).

**2002**

There was, of course, no talking allowed at the dinner table.

Allison kept her eyes on her plate. Last night, Luther had asked her to pass the salt. He’d looked up at her and asked her, and Allison’s mind had screeched to a halt in front of his earnest, handsome face. She’d passed him the salt, and he’d said thank you, and that had been it, but… well, it didn’t take much to send her spiraling off these days, especially when it came to Luther.

The record playing from the corner, a wordy treatise on improvised tourniquets, crackled and came to a stop.

“You may be excused,” Reginald said, placing down his fork.

Allison got up. Across the table, she could see Luther stand up and dutifully push in his chair, and she flushed. Luther was her brother. She was Luther’s sister, no more, no less. And what did she know about romance, anyway? She was only thirteen. 

“Why do you keep looking at Luther like that?” Five said, teleporting next to her.

“I don’t look at Luther,” Allison blurted out.

It was the wrong thing to say. Five’s eyes narrowed.

“Of course you look at Luther,” Five said. “And you’re not helping your case with such an obviously false claim. You’re… you’re _mooning_ over him.”

“Why do you even care so much?” Allison said. Her face was burning. “If it bothers you so much, you can just… not look at me. At him. At us.”

It gave her a warm glow to refer to her and Luther as us. Almost as warm as when he looked up at her over his plate, blond hair adorably tousled, face open and hesitant and Allison wanted to—

“Well,” Five said, “he’s mooning at you back.”

**2019**

Allison’s high heels clicked on the wide floor of the atrium. The high ceilings above her were shadowed, and she didn’t let herself crane her neck and look up at them— either they’d changed since she’d left or they’d stayed the same, and she didn’t know which was better or worse. When she stormed out of the Academy, seventeen and defiant, she’d pictured herself leaving behind an intact pod of her remaining family— Luther and Diego and Klaus and Vanya and Dad and Mom all watching her retreating back with jaws dropped. It unsettled her to picture the erosion of the unit. She was glad she’d gotten out when she did.

“Allison?”

Allison turned.

“It’s been a while,” Luther said, standing in the doorway.

Allison swallowed. Her memory of Luther had swollen up to fit the in-between spaces: freeway traffic, air-conditioned waiting rooms before auditions with a dozen other women who looked exactly like her, the empty insides of the boxes Patrick had presented her with when he’d told her to move out. Any time she’d needed a reassuring pair of blue eyes, she’d grasped for him. She was afraid she’d wrung all the reality out of the memory of him by now, considering how often she reached for it.

Luther stumbled on his way towards her.

“Careful,” Allison said, holding out a hand to steady him. “Are you all right?”

“Gravity,” Luther said, dazed. “It’s new.”

“You went to space,” Allison said. She winced. What a dumb thing to say. But Luther had been planning to go to the stars since he was a kid: not just dreaming, but planning, pulling Five aside to help with equations, fumbling through them by himself once Five disappeared, building tiny models with his big hands and writing notes to himself in his notebooks in careful cursive. When Allison had decided she wanted to be a movie star, she’d just done it.

Although she supposed that was a luxury, to be able to do that.

“I did,” Luther said.

Allison tilted her head. “That’s all?”

“I lived on the moon for four years,” Luther said. He opened his mouth like he had something else to say, and then he closed it again. “That’s— that’s all.”

“Was it nice?” Allison said.

“In part,” Luther said. “Cold up there, though. I grew a beard.”

“Seriously?”

“Allison, I was on the moon without another living soul,” Luther said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Point taken,” Allison said. “Did you get lonely?”

Luther’s face went still.

It was the wrong question to ask. The set of Luther’s jaw was horribly familiar, held in place by years of barked commands. Allison bit her tongue, resisted the urge to Rumor him into “that you never heard that” and suck her words back into her mouth like a vacuum cleaner.

“Well,” Luther said, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Allison said.

“Missed” was the wrong word. _I had recurring dreams about you. I worried about you. Sometimes I pretended my movie-star husband was you. I lost sleep over you. I wondered if you felt the same._

Luther was looking down at her with a heartbreakingly guarded expression. When did he get so tall?

“Holy _shit!”_ Klaus said, coming up between them. “That’s still a thing?”

Allison and Luther both turned. Klaus looked like a vulture in his enormous patchwork overcoat, slightly unsteady on his feet, face alight with manic energy.

“Klaus,” Luther said.

“Hola,” Klaus said, holding up his _HELLO_ palm. He pointed between them. “So are you two still drinking from the sacred chalice of sexual tension?”

“Hi,” Allison said, not daring to glance at Luther. “We—”

“I mean, I’ve got to say that if I heard about this whole shebang from the outside, I’d think it was crazy built for incest,” Klaus interrupted them. He wiggled his fingers in the air inhumanly fast. “Seven kids! Living together! For their whole childhoods! We had a robot for a mom! And everyone was like, it’s not really incest, but it so is, you know? You guys are my _family.”_ Klaus splayed his long fingers over his heart and looked up at them both with bright eyes. 

“Are those tears?” Luther said.

“God, I’m just really overcome to see you again,” Klaus said. He wiped at his eyes. “And I’m a little bit everywhere right now from some, you know, some side effects. Of, you know, my medication.”

“Right,” Luther said doubtfully.

“But back to the topic at hand,” Klaus said, raising his index finger. “I think it’s a little cute but honestly a little fucked-up that now that you’ve been exposed to the whole wide world of people and things and planets, you never stopped orbiting each other. But that’s almost poetic, isn’t it? Go you, I suppose.”

Allison frowned. It sort of was, actually. She felt like Klaus had peeled her open uncomfortably far, like she was another layer of wallpaper in his bedroom.

"We don't need your approval," Luther said.

“Good, 'cause I can't even decide if I wanna give it or not,” Klaus said, hitching up his leather pants. “I’m going to go have a cigarette. Hey, if either of you would care to join me, I’ll probably be passed out cold on the sofa in like two hours.”

“You should take better care of yourself,” Luther said.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about little old me,” Klaus said. “Hey, if you come keep me company and then decide you just want to rekindle your undeniable flame of really intense physical need for each other in our childhood living room with the creepy taxidermy animal heads, I won’t even notice. I’ll be so unconscious it would take _me_ to wake me up again.”

“It’s good to see you, Klaus,” Allison said. She tucked a stray curl behind her ear. Behind her, Luther was huge and still.

**Post-apocalypse, year unknown**

“It’s been so long since I had this body,” Allison said.

“I know,” Luther said. They were sitting in his bedroom, sharing his old twin bed, and Luther was looking up at his intricate arrangements of mobiles and maps. With their teenage bodies in their teenage home, the apocalypse reset felt eerily seamless. “I used to have trouble remembering how big I was. After the transfusion, it was like driving an eighteen-wheeler after a lifetime in a sports car. But now I don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“And here I was thinking it was weird that I didn’t have highlights,” Allison said.

Luther chuckled. Allison took a chance and leaned her weight against him. She felt Luther pause for a moment, and then one big arm came up and squeezed her shoulders. Allison rested her cheek against him.

Luther cleared his throat. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Luther.”

“When Five brought us back,” Luther said, making a vague time-travel-shenanigans gesture, “we woke up in our Academy uniforms. Totally the same as they were when we were, uh, actual kids. In the old timeline. Mine still had the elbow patch from when Diego wrestled me to the ground over talking over him in mission debrief and Grace had to sew my sleeve back up.” He lifted his right arm. “See?”

“I see,” Allison said. “Did Diego really manage to wrestle you to the ground, or were you letting him win?”

“Diego’s not incompetent,” Luther said.

“But you have super strength.”

“Diego has super stubbornness,” Luther said. He gave his elbow a rueful smile. “I should have been nicer to him.”

“Cut yourself some slack,” Allison said. “We all should have been nicer to each other. You should have been nicer to Diego, Diego should have been nicer to you. Klaus should have been nicer to Ben. Five should have been nicer to me, and I should have been nicer to Vanya, and, well, Vanya shouldn’t have tried to blow up the world.”

“You’re right,” Luther said. He brought his elbow down and picked at the patch. “I’ve got one more question.”

Allison tilted her head.

“Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”

“We came up here a long time ago,” Luther said. He turned his head to take in the greenhouse attic, still lush. “And you brought food, and I brought the records, and… something else.”

“Oh,” Allison said.

“You said you’d never take it off.”

Allison brought a hand up to her throat. Where in the other timeline there’d been a tender gash, there was now a thin gold chain, and she pulled the golden pendant over the collar of her shirt. Luther’s eyes followed it.

“I did take it off,” Allison said, looking up at him. The truth felt horrible, but she knew the lie would have been worse. “In the last timeline. I’m sorry.”

“I know you did,” Luther said. “You, ah, you left it here, when you moved out.”

“I wanted to leave everything behind,” Allison said. “It hurt to put it on. It made me feel like I was abandoning you.”

“It’s all right,” Luther said. Allison could feel him swallow against her. “If you wanted to take it off now, you could.”

“Are you kidding me?” Allison said, pulling back. “Luther, I wouldn’t lose track of it for the world. I— I know I said it hurt to put it on, but the moment I got on the plane to LA without it, it hurt more. Sometimes I lay there in bed in my house and wondered if I’d ever have the guts to make my assistant go back and get it for me. But that would have made me a hypocrite, I guess.”

“Right,” Luther said.

“I never used to worry so much about being a hypocrite.”

“You can’t worry about everything all at once,” Luther said. His hand found her back, rubbing between her shoulder blades, and Allison sank into his touch. Luther’s face was earnest and his hands were warn. “You had a lot going on, Allison.”

“So did you,” Allison said.

Luther lifted his shoulder in an awkward shrug. Allison fell forward into him again and she let him hold her, closing her eyes against the fabric of his uniform. Their teenage bodies seemed ridiculous now.

“Not many people get a second chance,” Luther said.

“But we did,” Allison said against his chest.

“We did,” Luther said. He cleared his throat. “The past is the past. It’s not like we should forget it, but we’ve got a new beginning now, and we’ve done what we’ve done, and maybe we could… maybe we could start over.”

He made a surprised noise as Allison reached for his face and tilted his head down to kiss him.

“Start over,” Allison said. She leaned her forehead against his. “I think we could do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> [electra-xt](https://electra-xt.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, taking prompts, come talk to me about TUA!


End file.
